The World as Will and Representation

What is the world we live in?

You can say that the world is what we see through our eyes, what we feel around us, yet what is the world stripped to its core?

When the breeze of spring brushes your cheeks, you are reminded that this is real—that you are awake, not dreaming.

This is to fully trust your senses.

Yet what we perceive of the world around us is always through our senses, which goes through our mind, and the mind extracts the product in which we perceive.

As German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason said:
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason.

We are the subject, and we are observing objects in an active way, where our mind is shaping what we see, shaping the objects.

Again, Kant wrote:

If I were to take away the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world would have to disappear, as this is nothing but the appearance in the sensibility of our subject and one mode of its representations.

How can we look at the world without our mind interfering, filtering the image of the world?

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer holds the hope to see the world without the filtering of the image in his The World as Will and Representation.

The human body, for Schopenhauer, is “the narrow door to the truth”. The body possesses a unique duality of both perception and sensation. For perception, in no way is our body different to the other objects that we perceive. We see and we touch our own body just like we how we interact with other objects. Yet the body is unique because we can also feel it. It offers sensation. The body is both will (what I described as sensation) and representation (what I described as perception).

Do other objects have this duality?

If you say that other objects do not possess this duality—they only have representation, then you are saying that your body, you as an individual is unique within this world, and this leads to theoretical egoism.

But Schopenhauer argues that the world is both will and representation, it is only that we cannot feel the will of other objects.

The will is special. The will exists independent of space and time, and therefore we cannot perceive the object of the will itself. The will exists as one.

How does this knowledge affect the way we see the world?

The world, for Schopenhauer, is not a static arrangement of objects but a dynamic interplay of will and representation that escapes our direct perception, so our perception is always a partial doorway into a reality that remains beyond complete understanding.

We should all consider how our will guides what you notice and how your mind processes that into representation, however, it is impossible to strip the world to its core.

What is the world stripped to its core?